Saturday, June 16, 2007

Watching "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and it occurs to me that while the interracial relationship is perceived as freakishly weird, the fact that the 37 year old distinguished doctor picks up a young 23 year old thing at a "Dean's party" after lecturing at a university is seen as perfectly normal.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, says the current surge of 21,500 troops is not "open-ended" and warned that "time is running out" for the United States to turn things around in Iraq.

Hannity: I think the Democrats have gone further left than anybody would have anticipated. I think these bloggers have really gotten to them. I think they’re really positioning themselves that they’re gonna have a very difficult time moving center. Do you see that?”

The fact is that "immigrants not learning English" is only a problem for people who are offended by the stray sounds of Spanish. The children of immigrants do learn English. There just is no identifiable "problem" here. Sure older immigrants may not become fluent in The President's English, but who cares?

The latest popular genre of blog posts and diaries seems to be of the "What We Need to Do" variety with respect to lefty blogs and the "netroots." There's nothing especially wrong with this genre, and it's quite a bit less annoying than it's more offensive "What You Must Do With Your Blog" evil twin, but they're still roughly cut from the same cloth.

It's bit like the rhetorical tic of plenty of politicians, "What Democrats need to do is..." The better thing to do is... just do it! Show the way, without assuming everyone does - or should - share your priorities.

There's probably a greater for potential for the reverse elite consensus than the elite consensus (mildly liberal on social issues but pretty right on economic ones), but it is hard to see how the basic alignment of the parties could be radically altered.

Though the candidate himself wasn't necessarily all that outspoken on the issues, preferring instead to just brand himself as a guy who would go to Washington and magically fix stuff, I basically saw Ross Perot/Reform party as that party. There are voters there, just not enough of them.

Paul Waldman and Kinsley are right that the public opinion has moved tremendously on homosexuality generality and gay rights in particular in a very short time. Paul's also right that Democrats have, for the most part, failed to take a leadership role in this area.

It's a shame that not only are prominent politicians failing to get ahead of the public, they've let the public get ahead of them. Leaders are supposed to...lead!

The ending of the novel is the ultimate absurdity, with all of the predictions about the Iraq war leading to beautiful democracy breaking out all across the Middle East coming true. Kalfus plays this part relatively straight which emphasizes just how goddamn absurd the whole "invade Iraq and everyone becomes an Israel-loving human rights embracing Democracy" idiocy is.

Someone asked in comments why the press seems to focus on the "core inflation" number, which excluded food and energy prices, instead of the overall inflation rate. This really isn't some grand conspiracy, it's just that these numbers get reported in the business press whose audience isn't especially concerned with the price of food and energy, but instead concerned with how this news will impact "the markets" and Fed policy. Food and energy prices are volatile, and stripping them out of the month-to-month inflation numbers is supposed to provide a better idea of what the underlying inflation trend is. Longer term the focus is on the overall inflation rate and not the core rate.

Basically, the month to month rate is noisy, so the idea is to try to strip out a big component of that noise to get a better sense of the signal.

The percentage of U.S. mortgages entering foreclosure in the first three months of the year was the highest in more than 50 years, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

As the association released its numbers, the Federal Reserve held a hearing to determine whether regulators could do anything to crack down on abusive lending practices, which have exacerbated the problem.

This took longer than I expected - I thought the initial push knocking down the house of cards would come from an interest rate spike - but it looks like it's snowballing.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, says the current surge of 21,500 troops is not "open-ended" and warned that "time is running out" for the United States to turn things around in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, June 15 (Reuters) - All U.S. troop reinforcements heading to Iraq to help restore security have now arrived, but it could take several more months before their weight is fully felt, the U.S. military said on Friday.

...

It will take 30 to 60 days for the new arrivals, who have taken total U.S. troop levels in Iraq to 160,000, to win the confidence of residents and start getting the intelligence needed to counter insurgent and militant attacks, Garver said.

I never noticed any pressure to not be religious at any of the colleges I was at in various capacities, and more than that colleges generally have plenty of social/religious groups and activities for people to belong to and participate in. It's one of the various tribes one can join in college, and with organizational structures in place and your social group centered around it I don't see much reason that religious identification/affiliation would decline among those who attend college.

I haven't really read all that much big picture analysis of potential threats to the financial industry due to the imploding subprime mortgage market.

une 14 (Bloomberg) -- Bear Stearns Cos., the second-biggest U.S. underwriter of mortgage bonds, is liquidating holdings from one of its hedge funds after making money-losing bets on subprime mortgage bonds, said three people with knowledge of the decision.

Bear Stearns sought bids today from prospective buyers for about $3.8 billion of mortgage securities from the fund, said the people, who declined to be identified because the plan isn't public. The 10-month-old Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, which is down about 20 percent this year, had about $600 million of investors' money and borrowed to increase its buying power, one of the people said.

As delinquencies rise on loans made to homebuyers with poor credit or heavy debt loads, bondholders stand to lose as much as $75 billion on securities backed by the mortgages, according to an estimate in April from Pacific Investment Management Co., manager of the world's largest bond fund. Bear Stearns's fund is among the first to start liquidating because of the subprime crisis, which already has forced lenders such as New Century Financial Corp. and ResMae Mortgage Corp. into bankruptcy.

Robbin: going back to appointments clause. Your honor has received an amicus brief.

Walton: With all due respect, these are intelligent people, but I would not accept this brief from a first year law student. I believe this was put out to put pressure on this court in the public sphere to rule as you wish. [Reggie pissed]

Walton: Disclosing that he has received many angry letters in response to the sentencing, wishing bad things to him and his family. He had thrown away a few, but then decided he had better begin to save them, in the event someone were to act on these threats, a record would need to remain.

Well, the civil rights division has been busy worrying about non-existent-to-trivial religious discrimination cases such as this one:

Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

I think these types of things are probably best fought with a little gonzo action. Just overload the system with Wiccans, Pastafarians, Rastafarians, Mormons, Scientologists, Satanists, Discoballmouseatarians, and every other religion which might not be seen as a "real religion" by the local powers that be until they begin to see that maybe this isn't such a good idea after all.

With his resolution calling for the ouster of Dick Cheney, Rep. Dennis Kuchinich on Wednesday announced renewed efforts to impeach the vice president.

The Ohio Democrat said his resolution calling for Cheney's impeachment now has eight co-sponsors. Kucinich appeared with Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Al Wynn, D-Md., Wednesday at a press conference announcing the stepped-up efforts.

Kucinich announced the impeachment resolution a month ago on Capitol Hill and gathered reporters at the same spot Wednesday.

What's frustrating is how apparently ego-driven all this is. I'm a grownup so this shouldn't surprise me, but it still does. I get the sense that many of the very serious people who thought this glorious war was an awesome idea are very pissed off at... the dirty fucking hippies.

Try being pissed off at yourselves for awhile. Feels bad for a bit, but you come through it a better person.

CNN's Barbara Starr, actually making a good point regarding Iran for a change.

After 9/11, the justifiability of our actions quickly got confused with the wisdom of them. I don't know if elements in Iran are arming "bad guys," or if they are whether those elements have anything to do with the Iranian government, but even if they are, what do you bomb? And what's the consequence of doing so?

In fairness, this is a sentiment I see on our side sometimes, usually coming from people I imagine have never turned the money on. Not that there's anything wrong about withholding money from things you don't approve of, it's the idea that there's this entire movement behind you who will Really Show Them. If you haven't figured out how to build up some sort of base of power/money, it doesn't really achieve anything to withhold what you weren't providing anyway.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

I haven't paid a visit to Crazy Andy's place in awhile, and I see that though he's come a long way since his "5th column" days he still doesn't have any sense about policy. He writes:

The moment when politicans get serious about that, they'll propose a real gas tax increase. Right now, they're still unserious.

I'm curious just how high a "real gas tax increase" Crazy Andy envisions, but any gas tax bill not called "The Political Suicide Act of 2007" wouldn't have any real impact on oil dependence. Back in those glorious days of $1.25/gallon gas I think it would've been great to slip in a $.50 federal gax tax and devote the revenue to mass transit. But since then gas prices have gone up over 100% without having any real impact on gas consumption. In other words, had a $1.75/gallon gas tax been implemented a few years ago, right after all of the politicians responsible lost their jobs we would have discovered that it didn't do much to diminish gas consumption.

A gas tax might be good policy for various reasons, but unless there's political will to jack up the total price to $5-6/gallon there isn't going to be much impact on gas consumption. Modest increases in CAFE standards would do a lot more, and be much less politically unpopular.

I've received about 50 calls and probably 2 dozen voicemails from an NCO Financial Systems on my cell phone over the past couple of weeks. I've never answered, as they aren't trying to reach me, but are leaving messages for a woman not named Duncan. They appear to be an aggressive collections agency.

Ultimately this will continue until our elites are willing to confront Iraq and their own culpability, from Gulf War I through the sanctions period to the present. While there's a tendency to see Gulf War I as a "good war," presumably because it wasn't a clusterfuck for the US, there seems to be little willingness to examine that war as part of a continuous chain of events which led, ultimately, to where we are now.

Digby reminds us of Huckabee's part in the Wayne DuMond situation. DuMond was one of those Clinton-era wingnuttery cases, during those exciting heady days of the 90s when literally anything could be used as evidence of Clinton's evil. DuMond was a pet case of Half Moon Steve Dunleavy, whose advocacy on DuMond's behalf ultimately led to his release and the subsequent murder of a woman in Kansas City.

BAGHDAD - Suspected Sunni insurgents bombed and badly damaged a span over the main north-south highway leading from Baghdad on Tuesday — the third bridge attack in as many days in an apparent campaign against key transportation arteries.

The attack occurred 35 miles south of Baghdad and just six miles south of a bridge brought down on Sunday by what was believed to be a suicide truck bomber. Three U.S. soldiers guarding that bridge were killed in Sunday's blast.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Indeed. The problem isn't that there's celebrity coverage, or gossip news, or even that sometimes there's political gossip. The problem is when celebrity news becomes the news, and when political gossip becomes the model for political journalism.

There's nothing wrong with a 24 hour cable news network devoting some of its time to covering celebrity/gossip news and there's nothing wrong with devoting a bit of extra time to it when there's "big" gossip going on. The problem is when these things break free of their little compartments and take over the entire network.

SOFIA, Bulgaria - President Bush, turning from adulation in the Balkans to difficulties back home, said Monday that his stalled immigration overhaul would be revived and his embattled attorney general would not fall under a Senate vote of no-confidence.

“I believe we can get it done,” Bush said of the immigration bill that has run into deep trouble on Capitol Hill. “I’ll see you at the bill signing.”

I should confess that I am an unabashed Leavitt fan. For a decade, I have looked forward to interviewing him at these summer meetings of the association and to seeing him occasionally on his visits to Washington. He is one of the rare politicians from whom you always learn something new, because he is out front of most public officials in identifying and thinking through emerging policy problems.

Maybe Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and his staff are just in denial. Or maybe they don't read the papers, thus missing the sad news that Sen. Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) died Monday, seven months after he was diagnosed with leukemia.

Whatever the case, Leavitt's office called Thomas's office late Thursday afternoon to request a meeting with the late senator.

There are people who are not happy that Democrats won in 2006 because it has made it harder for them to make the case that Democrats can't win without "them" (where "them"=the South, religious voters, etc...). But aside from that, Mudcat's foray into the blogosphere was a marvel of hypocritical self-contradicting hilarity. Bowers:

Maybe it is just because I am an irony-loving Gen X type, but there is so much of this type of bizarre, self-contradictory language in Mudcat's post that I think it should be considered a work of true paranoid genius. Start an exchange of ideas by telling people to go to hell. Attack the metropolitan, pseudo-intellectual wing of the Democratic Party by defending Joe Klein. Dismiss John Edwards's biggest area of activist support in the name of rural southern whites. Decry intolerance by stating "I don't care what the "Metropolitan Wing" of my party thinks." Call others pseudo-intellectual without ever sourcing a single stereotype you use. Say you have no problem with incivility in politics, and then lash out against the political blogosphere for being incivil. Claim others are being hypocritical while doing everything I already listed here. Somehow, manage to do all of this in 600 words while maintaining a straight face.

And, unlike the axis of Mallaby and Friedman, I understand that not every treaty with the words "free trade" on the cover has all that much to do with "free trade." Even if one is basically pro-free trade, one can object to such things on the grounds that they don't go far enough (still protecting Big Sugar), or that they include unrelated intellectual property protections.

Like much legislation, such treaties are generally cumbersome complicated agreements which include various bits of favoritism for lots of special interests. That our very serious elites seem to not understand these basic issues makes them very silly people.

We do seem to operate in a world where there's something unseemly about intra-party political disagreement and we somehow lack the appropriate discourse for it. Mostly there seems to be an inability to acccept the fact that different candidates do have different priorities and different visions for the world and that their desired policies and expressed priorities would likely have different impacts on different segments of the population.

There's a tendency to see political differences as simple rankings ("my health plan is better than yours!") instead of seeing them as... genuine differences. And consequently disagreements tend to be painted as fights about who is more awesome rather than just disagreements.

As an aside, one of the more amusingly revealing comments by Joe Klein recently was when he expressed his belief that both he and Dick Armey were playing within the 40 yard lines. It's very important for Joe Klein's identity to believe that's where he, and all sensible people, are playing. It's also very important for people like Dick Armey to con people like Joe Klein into thinking that they're just quibbling about the details. But the fact is that Dick Armey is selling a vision for this country which is radically different than what mushy centrist Joe Klein supports. That he fails to see this after all this time, even as he constantly fights the dirty fucking hippies who live under his bed, is hilarious.

BAGHDAD - Three American soldiers guarding a vital bridge over one of Baghdad's main highways were killed when a suicide bomber detonated his truck next to a support pillar and the span collapsed into shattered concrete, the U.S. military said Monday.

One of my favorite columns by Broder was when he got in a high snit when a bunch of history professors signed a letter condemning the Clinton impeachment. The beginning and ending:

When academics decide to become activists, they sometimes bring badly needed wisdom and perspective to raging political debates. But when they plunge in heedlessly, they risk looking ridiculous.

Both sides were on display last week at a hotel ballroom where three noted American historians -- speaking for more than 400 of their profession -- unloaded a broadside condemnation of the impeachment proceedings the House has voted to begin against President Clinton.

The rhetoric of their statement, read by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. of City University of New York, began on a relatively calm note and built to a tantrum.

...

This tenured trashing of Congress for meeting its responsibility says more about the state of the history profession than about the law of the land.

Class dismissed.

In Broder's world, not even elite history professors should dare express opinions about goings on in Broderville, let alone voters or dirty fucking hippie bloggers.

This article makes the simple point that opposition to the immigration bill was much more intense than its support. That's true for the obvious reason that it was a "compromise" which left little for potential supporters to be thrilled about.

The takeaway lesson is that if intensity of support is important for achieving legislative goals, one should perhaps craft legislation that can actually receive intense support. I recognize that given the senate makeup the odds of something like that passing aren't too high, but the supposed compromise didn't pass either. It'd be nice to actually give supporters something to, you know, support for a change. And I'm not just talking about immigration.